What is it about?
Joan Robinson and Paul Samuelson found little to agree upon in a correspondence which began in 1946, shortly after the death of Keynes, and ended a year prior to Robinson’s death in 1983. One way to read the correspondence is to keep in mind that Keynesian uncertainty was central to Robinson’s understanding of how capitalist economies function. Samuelson, never impressed by Keynes’s handling of uncertainty, understood capital theory—if not capitalism—in terms of dynamic programming, with its perfect foresight entailments. This is evident throughout his letters to Robinson, although rarely acknowledged in a straightforward way, particularly during the period from 1971 until 1975 when their disagreements came to a head. On several occasions, Robinson despaired of making any progress in getting Samuelson to acknowledge the importance of her questions. Unfailingly polite to her, he granted only in a letter to Solow that, “She is on to a real problem…”.
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Why is it important?
The correspondence between Joan Robinson and Paul Samuelson, housed at Duke University, provides a case study in how two of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, despite their common interest in the grand theoretical problem of economic growth under capitalism, could so completely fail to communicate with one another. The importance of the correspondence lies in showing how certain formalisms can put up insurmountable roadblocks to productive interaction.
Perspectives
Joan Robinson had an office next to mine when she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Waterloo in the fall semester of 1971. One day, she showed me a letter from Paul Samuelson in which he referred her to chapter 13 of his book with Dorfman and Solow, Linear Programming and Economic Analysis, often referred by the acronym, DOSSO (McGraw-Hill, 1958). I showed Joan the passage on page 321, where the authors of DOSSO comment on the need for "vision at a distant", which I interpreted as the assumption of perfect foresight. Joan responded immediately, "But that's exactly my point!" She was dumbfounded that anyone would make such an assumption in a discussion of how capitalism actually works. It was the recollection of this conversation with Robinson that prompted me to enthusiastically embrace Geoff Harcourt's invitation to join him in writing a survey of the Robinson/Samuelson correspondence, which is housed at Duke University.
Harvey Gram
City University of New York System
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Keynesian Uncertainty: The Great Divide Between Joan Robinson and Paul Samuelson in Their Correspondence and Public Exchanges, January 2019, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-56812-0_16.
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